As a missionary priest in Sierra Leone during the civil war in the 1990s, Father Michael Hickey experienced many terrible things: he saw a military truck dragging corpses behind it, was shot at while driving through the countryside and listened as child soldiers clinically discussed the mechanics of decapitation.

Last autumn, on the eve of his enforced retirement at 82 — a bishop can ask a priest to retire when he turns 75 — Hickey sat in the ballroom of the Shamrock Lodge hotel in Athlone, a town in the very centre of Ireland, surrounded by a couple of hundred well-wishers. They spoke warmly of his past seven, quieter years as curate in Drum, Co Roscommon, where he had consoled the sick and bereaved. After speeches and cake, a two-piece band struck up a country number, couples took to the floor, women linked arms for a gentle jive and people chatted over tea, sandwiches and pints of Guinness.

The celebration, though, was also an act of defiance. Parishioners were furious that their much loved priest was being forced to retire. When, in the summer of 2024, Hickley had announced from the altar that he was being “sacked”, within weeks a committee had gathered 2,300 signatures demanding he be allowed to stay and delivered it to Kevin Doran, the Bishop of Elphin, at the diocesan office in Sligo. They confronted Doran too when he came to say Mass in the parish church. But the bishop stood firm.

Father Michael Hickey says goodbye to young parishioners in Drum, Co Roscommon, above and below, after he was forced to retire last year

LAURENCE J FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES MAGAZINE

LAURENCE J FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES MAGAZINE

That such an emotional battle erupted at all is remarkable. In today’s Ireland, the retirement of an elderly priest might be expected to pass with barely a shrug. After three decades of clerical abuse scandals and sweeping social change, the Catholic Church’s standing has collapsed. The 2022 Irish census showed 69 per cent of the population identified as Catholic, down from 79 per cent in 2016 — and 93 per cent 40 years ago.

Religious decline is hardly unique to Ireland. In the UK census, for example, in 2021 46 per cent described themselves as Christian compared with 72 per cent in 2001. But in Ireland the collapse has been spectacular given how central the Irish Catholic Church once was to national identity. Masses on Sunday mornings are sparsely attended and priests have largely stopped wearing their uniforms outside of church, often for fear of abuse.

Hickey’s send-off suggested a flicker of life in a moribund institution. His congregation’s anger showed a rare lay assertiveness: “The church is the people,” one woman said. They were also more progressive than stereotypes of the devout; some openly supported ending celibacy and ordaining women. But most at the party were over 50. Their children rarely attend Mass, preferring to take their own kids to hurling practice. What they want to know is: can the church they love adapt to modern Ireland?

St Brigid’s Church, Drum, where Father Hickey was a priest

The church has brought much of the crisis on itself. Decades of scandal began 33 years ago when Eamonn Casey, the Bishop of Galway — one of the most celebrated and high-profile bishops — was revealed to have fathered a child. Then came revelations of systematic abuse of children by priests, nuns and brothers, uncovered in investigations that also exposed the state’s complicity. The scandals shattered the Catholic Church’s authority and paved the way for landmark referendums legalising divorce, same-sex marriage and abortion.

The collapse in trust is visible in every parish. Fifty years ago, nine in ten Catholics in Ireland went to Mass every week. A survey earlier this year by the Iona Institute in Dublin put the figure at just 16 per cent. Among the 40 per cent who view the Catholic Church unfavourably, 73 per cent said it was because of the abuse scandals.

There is now a chronic shortage of priests to minister to the dwindling congregations. In the past 30 years the number of working priests has halved to about 2,000. Vocations have also plummeted. In the 1950s, hundreds of new students would enter seminaries in Ireland. Last month it was revealed that there are just 13 men beginning their studies for the priesthood. (In 2023 in England and Wales — where about 8 per cent identify as Catholic — 16 men began training to be Catholic priests, down from more than 100 annually in the late 1980s.)

But the vocations crisis also has deep roots. The peak for recruiting new priests was the early 1960s, when there were nearly 6,000 priests in the country — one for every 440 Catholics. In the decade after 1962, vocations dropped by more than 40 per cent and the dropout rate from seminaries reached 60 per cent. Ireland was opening up to foreign investment. It launched a television service and introduced free secondary education. Sex and marriage, the Catholic sociologist (and later bishop) Jeremiah Newman noted in 1971, were no longer “painted with danger signs”.

“What are you doing there?” a priest asked Father Jonas Rebamontan in 2019 when he heard his friend was moving from the Philippines to Boyle — a small town in Co Roscommon. The assumption was that Ireland was the last place needing foreign priests. Indeed, as recently as the 1980s thousands of Irish priests and nuns worked as missionaries across 80 countries. But Rebamontan is part of a steady stream of arrivals recruited largely from Africa and Asia to fill the growing list of vacancies.

Rebamontan, 46, had started to prepare for the priesthood when he was 12 in a seminary in Manila. He was already familiar with Ireland: his mother’s favourite film was The Quiet Man, John Ford’s classic rom-com filmed in Galway and Mayo, in which John Wayne and Maureen O’Hara have a tempestuous rural romance aided by a crafty parish priest. When he graduated to the senior seminary he was taught by an Irish professor and read Irish novels. He was ordained on St Patrick’s Day.

Priests are increasingly recruited from abroad to fill vacancies in Ireland; Father Jonas Rebamontan, 46, arrived from the Philippines in 2019

LAURENCE J FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES MAGAZINE

He arrived in Boyle just as Covid struck. In lockdown he spent his days walking the few metres from his house to the parish’s striking 1970s circular church, then to his slot at the local supermarket. He took walks around nearby Lough Key. It took time to get to know his congregation. But people appreciated it when he helped cut turf in the bogs and invited him to the local pub.

In the Philippines the Catholic Church is still a vital and powerful participant in public life. It campaigns to keep divorce and abortion illegal and weighs in on social issues, defending indigenous communities resisting mining on their lands. “The priest has authority,” Rebamontan said of his home country. “We have a saying, ‘The word of the priest cannot be broken.’ ”

In Ireland, however, he discovered that the priest is at best a peripheral figure and sometimes an object of hostility. A priest friend went to a pro-life march in Dublin wearing his collar and a passerby told him he should be ashamed of himself. The small numbers who come to his Sunday Mass expect the service to be quick. He prepares children for communion and confirmation whose parents are not often in church. It is hard to get volunteers to help out. “Ireland is getting too secularised. When they get rich they start forgetting God,” he says.

When his fellow “missionary priests” get together, they share a sense that the Irish Catholic Church is resigned to its fate. “It’s in maintenance mode, hibernating. We’re just extra hands. I know a priest who is rushing to go home, counting down the days because he is demoralised.”

Recruiting more priests from overseas is “a burning topic”, according to Alphonsus Cullinan, 66, Bishop of Waterford and Lismore and chair of the Bishops’ Council for Vocations. Known as Bishop Phonsie, he has positioned himself as a defender of people he describes as “traditional Catholics”. He has said that Catholics who voted to repeal Ireland’s abortion ban were obliged to go to confession. In a letter to schools in his diocese he warned against yoga and mindfulness and urged teachers to lead children in the rosary instead.

For him, ordaining women or allowing priests to marry is a non-negotiable. Which leaves two solutions to the crisis: attracting vocations at home and importing priests from abroad. The church is looking around the world for priests; one bishop, Cullinan tells me, recently went to Africa in search of newly graduated seminarians. Meanwhile reinvigorating vocations at home, he acknowledges, is difficult in the wake of the abuse scandals: “The respectability of the priest has been wounded.”

Two years ago he launched the “Year of Vocations”, a campaign to encourage more young men to become priests. “Take the Risk for Christ” ran the slogan on social media. Instead of winning over a cynical public to the faith, he — like many others — imagines a diminished but resilient core of Catholics waiting for an opportune moment of revival. “I see little pockets of light all over the country,” Cullinan said just before the launch of the Year of Vocations. “I see the church as existing in small but wonderfully vibrant, loving pockets all around the place, like little candles, right around the country. And someday they’re going to light a big fire.”

The campaign may have delivered a short-term boost: 21 men began studying for the priesthood in 2024 — the highest number of new entrants in more than a decade, but still well below a healthy replacement rate. He says the new priests, though, are stronger for committing to their calling in a society that is indifferent or hostile. “Anyone who wants to be a priest is countercultural and has a lot of courage.”

In many ways the church now perceives itself as at odds with the national mainstream. Many clerics are especially distrustful of the media, expecting only chastisement and fearing they have nothing to gain from public debate. Some priests are so wary, it is as if — like the hunted priest in revolutionary Mexico in Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory — the Catholic Church in Ireland was an underground movement fearful of persecution.

“One consequence of the scandals is a loss of confidence in cultural action,” says Michael Kelly, former editor of The Irish Catholic. “The hierarchy have withdrawn from the public sphere. The feeling is that their voice is counterproductive; that they annoy people.”

The more liberal vision for the church’s future is rooted in the belief that cultural Catholics quietly long for fundamental reforms. “People are way ahead of the priests, and priests are ahead of the bishops,” says Father Brendan Hoban, a columnist and author who championed Pope Francis. Soline Humbert, a theologian who has long campaigned within the church for women’s right to pursue vocations, believes most congregations would welcome female priests. “Gradually things have shifted,” she says. “If it is a choice between having no priest and a woman, let’s have a woman.”

In its heyday in the 1950s, about a hundred students would begin their seven years of study at St Patrick’s College, Maynooth. It was the pre-eminent seminary among eight similar institutions across the country. Now it is the last one of its kind, a sprawling complex of gothic revival buildings 15 miles west of Dublin. It was founded in 1795 to keep Irish student priests at home rather than sending them to a revolutionary Continent and was so tightly regimented up to the 1960s that newspapers were banned and seminarians could not visit the local town without a supervisor. In recent decades a secular university campus has grown up around the seminary. The rhythm of daily life remains distinctive: aspiring priests rise at 7am for morning prayer, meditation and Mass, but spend the bulk of the day in theology and philosophy lectures, seminars or the library alongside other lay students. At 6pm they gather again for the Angelus and evening prayer, before night prayers at 9.45 and lights out soon after.

St Patrick’s College, Maynooth

ALAMY

When Father David Vard, 33, went to the seminary at Maynooth in 2010, aged 18, he also enrolled on a BA in history and philosophy in the secular university. Many of his classmates were unaware he was a seminarian. Like them, he came from a family that was culturally Catholic but went to Mass infrequently. His parents were divorced. While at school he was selected to help with a pilgrimage to Lourdes — the epiphany that led him to the priesthood. He became comfortable debating the role of the church with his agnostic peers at university. “I was prepared to make the case, to change my opinions, to agree to disagree. It’s good to be challenged. That’s the Ireland we exist in today.”

Of the 15 seminarians who studied with him at Maynooth, only seven were ordained — the other eight dropped out. At the beginning of October he became parish priest in Stradbally in Co Laois. His main aim, he says, is to be seen as “normal”, a telling measure of how low the reputation of priests has fallen in Ireland.

Students prostrate themselves during their ceremony of ordination

ALAMY

His vision for renewal resembles a kind of retail philosophy: seizing the occasions when people still encounter a priest — a wedding, a baptism, a funeral — to show them that he is approachable, decent and trustworthy, then using connection to bring them to the institution. “How can we then translate that — move from ‘my local priest is a good guy, I like him very much but I still don’t go to church’ to ‘my local priest is a good guy, I like him very much, he’s challenged me and maybe actually turned me towards faith’?” He may have grounds for optimism. The Iona Institute survey suggested a lingering, maybe sentimental, attachment to Catholicism: 51 per cent said they would be unhappy if the Catholic Church vanished altogether and 45 per cent said Catholic teaching still had some benefit.

He is active on both X and Instagram. “That’s where Jesus would find himself.” He went on a podcast run by the popular comedy duo the 2 Johnnies and fielded questions such as, “You must hear a lot of mad shit in confession?” In school visits he loves answering questions about how much money he makes and if he ever had a girlfriend. “There’s a sense that priests aren’t seen as intelligent men because we found ourselves on ‘the wrong side of history’. We were on the ‘no’ side for gay marriage and the ‘no’ side for the abortion referendum, therefore our opinions don’t matter. But on many other aspects of moral and social issues we are quite intelligent men who’ve done a lot of study — and maybe our opinions should matter.”

The number of priests in Ireland under 40 is tiny; he knows about 15 and they bond together. “Sometimes I feel like, ‘What am I at? I’m keeping a show on the road that’s dead.’ But I don’t think we are the last remaining priests. We’re going to have a different priesthood, a lesser priesthood, but we’re certainly not the last.”

The practical work of keeping a parish afloat can be as dispiriting as working in a sea of apathy. On a bright Wednesday morning, only eight people have gathered for 10am Mass with Father Tim Hazelwood, an energetic 66-year-old, in the village of Killeagh, Co Cork. St John the Baptist Church is one of many built during the heyday of Catholicism in the 19th century. Morning sunlight slants through the stained glass. But preserving these historic buildings comes at a cost: new roofs, rewiring, intricate stonework and costly insurance, all dependent on the weekly Sunday collection, which must also cover the priest’s modest salary of €31,000 (£27,000) a year. As Mass attendance has dwindled, so too have parish finances.

Income in Killeagh and Inch parish has declined by more than 15 per cent in the last ten years. In an office in his house next to the church, Hazelwood works with the parish pastoral council to try to keep money coming in. Because they cannot assume the church will be full every week, they deliver boxes of envelopes seeking donations to homes around the parish — colour-coded to indicate the different uses to which the money will be put. On some of the new estates only four households might return the envelopes with cash inside. “People who are supporting us are older and they are dying,” Hazelwood says.

Hazelwood also faces the challenge of refurbishing St Patrick’s, the parish’s second church, which has been closed since it was flooded in Storm Babet in October 2023. We set out in his car to drive to there, in the village of Inch about four miles away. Eleven years ago there were two priests in the parish and five Sunday Masses between the two churches. Now there is one on Saturday evening and two on Sunday.

A green skip is parked by the statue of St Patrick on a plinth outside the church. We enter by the sacristy, where the walls have been stripped, and walk onto a bare cement altar. In the nave the carpets have been removed and the pews are lined up side by side. Work to restore the church is now nearly finished and cost more than €500,000. Insurance covered some of this, but €200,000 came out of a fund built up by Hazelwood.

Father Tim Hazelwood has had to raise €200,000 to restore a church in his parish in Co Cork that was flooded by Storm Babet in 2023

LAURENCE J FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES MAGAZINE

The destruction wrought by the flood is merely a dramatic illustration of a dilemma that most parishes will have to confront from now on: whether to keep churches open when they are barely used and there is less and less money to maintain them. In rural areas parish identity is still strong, but it is increasingly the local Gaelic Athletic Association club that draws crowds and fundraising for local amenities, not the parish priest in his leaky church. On the way to lunch we drive past the local GAA pitch. The Killeagh hurling club has since become famous all over the country as the subject of a hit song by the Irish band Kingfishr — a viral tribute to the sport of hurling. We pass floodlights and a lavish modern clubhouse. “There’s the new place of worship,” Hazelwood says.

Maurice Walsh is the author of Bitter Freedom: Ireland in a Revolutionary World 1918-1923 (Faber £14.99). To order a copy go to timesbookshop.co.uk. Free UK standard P&P on orders over £25. Special discount available for Times+ members